Here’s the noise of a supermarket on a lunch hour. Here are the queues, the people pushing past one another; here is the tannoy calling for all service staff to get to the tills and here is the lunch hour sunlight shoving in through the doors.
Robert goes for the self-service queue as he often does. He’s ten from the front; one of the four checkouts isn’t working, an elderly man is attempting to bag his cans of dog food with one arthritic hand while the other holds his bag open, and on the other tills, young women are bagging their items as quickly as they can.
The queue shuffles and Robert shuffles with it. He swaps his sandwich, bottle of water and crisps to his other hand and brushes his fingers against the bulge in his front pocket just to make sure his gun is still there.
The queue moves forward a few inches and Robert’s thinking of the walk back to the bank, of having to eat his lunch literally on the go before the afternoon of people and questions and complaints and voices, always voices, just as there are here in the supermarket. All around him, always people, always a crowd, always not enough space, always someone on a mobile or pushing by to get away from the crowd just as he often wants to.
Deep breaths, he tells himself and smiles a little. The man in front catches the smile and returns it. Robert notices the man’s teeth are too white and square to be real and tells himself not to stare.
“Thought this would be the quickest queue,” the man says.
“So did I,” Robert replies and glances at his watch. There are now twenty minutes until the end of his lunch. “Looks like we were both wrong.”
A teenage boy bashes against Robert’s arm as he passes and Robert struggles to keep hold of his lunch. The boy turns, realises what happened and stops. Robert keeps his eyes on the boy’s and in the seconds before the boy speaks, Robert wonders which way this will go.
Then the boy is smiling and Robert’s hand relaxes.
“Sorry,” the boy says. “Didn’t mean to bump you.”
“No problem.”
The boy moves away and Robert glances at the man in front of him.
“Thought that was going to be unpleasant,” the man says.
“Just an accident. He didn’t mean anything.”
The queue shuffles. The elderly man leaves, the two young women are close behind him. At the front of the queue, a woman goes to one of the checkouts, a woman with a pushchair goes to the other. Robert passes a few seconds by surreptitiously checking out the first woman. She’s smartly dressed in a knee length skirt and suit jacket; her hair is smooth and the sunlight shines on it. Robert guesses she’s in her mid-thirties and idly wonders if she would be interested in him or if she would think him too young. No wedding ring, nothing in her shopping basket that suggests someone eating with a partner.
Robert laughs to himself. Checking out women in a supermarket wasn’t healthy. He’d be following her next.
A mobile rings, a shrill sound cutting through the voices of the shoppers closest to Robert. The woman at the till reaches into her jacket pocket, pulls out a phone and answers it even as she continues to fill her bag. Robert watches, dismayed and surprised that the woman is continuing with her conversation while packing her goods much more slowly and the queue continues to bake.
“Come on, love,” the man in front of Robert mutters. “Some of us have got things to do.”
Obviously not hearing this, the woman on the phone laughs and continues to bag her purchases one handed. The queue is now fifteen people long; the woman with the pushchair finishes bagging her items, pays and wheels the chair to the exit. Sweat runs down Robert’s forehead, a bead drips from his eyebrow and he wipes his head. His watch says his lunch is over in fifteen minutes. The voices and the people and the smell of all the shoppers stuck in the building while the queue doesn’t move, while the smartly dressed woman laughs into her phone and packs one item at a time and then fumbles in her handbag for her purse, the sunlight too hot for April, the noise, the people, the people, the people—
“Excuse me,” Robert says to the man in front of him.
“Certainly,” the man replies and slides out of the way.
Robert strides forward and those close to the front of the queue turn to see him coming and all move aside.
Robert stands behind the woman on the phone and taps her shoulder. She doesn’t react, her attention is taken up with fumbling her credit card and then attempting to pick up her bags with one hand.
In a loud, carrying voice, Robert says: “Excuse me, but don’t you think it would have been polite to have your conversation after you were finished here?”
The woman’s turning and in the profile of her face, Robert realises she’s drawing breath to shout at him, probably to ask what gives him the right to speak to her like that. And just before she completes her turn, Robert decides.
He pulls the Beretta .25 from his trouser pocket, aims it directly at the centre of the woman’s face and as she completes her movement and still has the phone to her ear, he shoots her.
Blood and bone and brain matter fly from the rear of her head in a great spray to coat the floor and wall. She drops, turning as she falls and giving the shoppers a brief view of the hole in the back of her head.
Robert pockets the gun. As he moves to rejoin the queue, three staff members reach the scene. One places a WET FLOOR sign beside the dead woman, another takes her bags and the third faces Robert, pen and incident form in hand.
“Reason?” the staff member says. He’s younger than Robert, probably still in his teens, and Robert briefly wonders how long the youth gets for his lunch.
“Holding up the queue,” Robert replies.
“Agreed,” someone shouts from the line behind him. It might be the man with the perfect teeth; Robert’s unsure.
“Understood,” the youth says. “If you could just write down your name, address, age and ID number.”
Sighing, Robert does as he’d asked and goes back to the queue.
The young staff member helps his colleagues move the body away; the woman’s smart shoes trail blood in a thin line as they drag her to the wall and a fourth staff member comes with a blanket.
At the tills, Robert glances at his watch. Barely ten minutes to eat. He scans his lunch, bags the items and pays with cash. As he heads to the exit, the man from the queue calls after him.
“Enjoy your lunch.”
Robert glances back and gives a small wave. Refreshing air slides in from the open doors and he thinks of the walk in the sun back to work.
“I will,” he calls. “You too.”
* * * * *
Here’s three months after she had to wait two long hours for the Social Murder Department to come to the shop and get rid of the body; here’s three months to the day after she listened to the store manager phone one Robert O’Brien to clarify what had happened, and here’s three months to the day after she could have told her manager and the Department that calling him was a waste of time because the result is always the same: another statistic added to the numbers, another little fact giving support to a law now nine years old.
Val (fifty-four and still doesn’t need to dye her hair) crosses Long Gate and walks towards Memorial Square. She’s not hurrying, although twilight will soon give away to darkness. The late evening’s too nice to move quickly and the three glasses of wine she had with a few of the girls after work are doing what they should. It’s been a good day, a good few days, really, and the bus doesn’t go for another twenty minutes.
She passes the silent shops and pubs with their drinkers under the parasols. She sees two of the shop’s regular customers — a young couple with two of their friends — and greetings and waves are given. The street grows quieter the further she walks. Once she’s beyond the pubs, there’s just her and her shadow. It rolls beside her and she comes within seconds of walking into the two young men who have come from Cross Street at just the right time to be directly in front of her.
“Sorry,” she says and the words are automatic. “Wasn’t looking where I was going.”
One of the men mutters and she doesn’t catch it.
“What was that?” Val says.
“I said, why don’t you try watching where you’re going?” the man says and stands in front of her, close. His friend is a few steps away, watching the events and quite clearly bored by them.
“There’s no need for that,” Val says. Things seem to have slowed down for her. She knows where she is just as she knows the friendly faces outside the pub are surely no more than a few minutes behind her. She knows her bus will be two miles, maybe three, down the road and the bus station will be quiet at this hour of the evening. She knows all these things just as she knows this man is older than she first thought. He’s easily in his early thirties, large and smells quite unpleasantly of beer.
“No need for what?” he says.
Things are still slow enough for her to notice the shaving rash on his neck and the little cut below it, to notice his hands out of his jeans pockets, to notice how amazingly square his shoulders are.
Time starts again for Val. It doesn’t matter that the man is old enough to not act like a child and is probably drunk as well; it matters that he is particularly rude and it matters that he is right in front of her.
“If you don’t mind,” she says and he grins.
“If I don’t mind what?”
He’s enjoying himself. And he’s not going to move. It doesn’t matter if his friend is bored and seconds away from saying they should get a move on. Nothing matters but what he’s enjoying.
Inwardly, Val sighs. Time has moved in a funny away again. She’s speaking but the words don’t reach her ears. She’s thinking instead, picturing her first kill on a day much colder than this, a sky dropping wet flakes of snow on to Christmas shoppers and the homeless man outside the shop, always outside the shop. The flakes of snow on the man and his dog and the other man standing over the homeless man, swearing at him, kicking his legs while the dog whimpers and Val on her way into the shop, ready to start her shift but coming to the man first, coming behind him with her knife.
Abruptly, her mind falls back to the present and the drunk man is poking a large finger toward her face. Each of his next words are punctuated with a jab that just misses her face and a harsh exhale of beery breath.
“You’re just an old woman,” he says and turns to his friend who’s finally registering emotion. He’s laughing. Not a lot, but enough.
Val swings a hand up, her knife slides out of her jacket sleeve and the blade strikes the man in the stomach. He makes a strange sound — whooooooof — and it’s miles from the screaming of the man she killed outside the shop.
This man, this new one, staggers backwards, hands over the wound and the blood. He falls to his knees, then drops. The wound is a large open mouth in his stomach. His friend stares down at the blood, then at Val. Unlike his friend’s stomach, his face is devoid of colour.
“You killed him, you bitch,” he whispers and rushes at her.
Val waves the knife. The man stops. Some of the blood coats her hand and wrist. All at once, she is very tired.
“Don’t,” she tells him. “I’ll stab you too.”
Her words aren’t a shout and they don’t need to be. He backs away, touches his friend’s shoulder and the bloody man makes no sound. With her free hand, Val pulls her mobile free from her trouser pocket and presses hard on the seven key, then again, then again.
She puts the phone to her ear and can’t help but wish she had walked another way home in the warmth of the summer evening.
The line connects and before the voice speaks, Val says to the dead man and his friend: “You’ve made me miss my bus, you know.”
* * * * *
Here he is, here’s Doug on his way to work. Here’s the snow gradually building into slushy piles on the pavements, the sky a leaden ceiling and the people below it hurrying to get out of the sharp December air.
Here’s Doug and he’s thinking of the killings, all the killings no longer on the news. These days, he thinks of nothing else. Doesn’t let it show, though. He shows the drinkers in the bar a smiling face, a happy man who pours their drinks and listens to them and acts more like forty-nine than thirty-nine. He even shows that happy man and that smiling face to the few drinkers who forget the way it goes, the way it has gone since Social Justice Day nine happy years ago. There are less and less of these few now. Most who forget the way it goes remember it in time. Some don’t, of course, and they are dealt with and the Department asks its cursory questions and the population lessens a fraction and those left are happy the country is a better place — if only by that fraction, if only by one less person causing trouble.
Even so, Doug doesn’t like it. Hates it. Thinks of almost nothing else. So here he is walking on Bishop’s Gate at two in the afternoon and there’s a dark sky above, sky full of snow and there’s the rest of the day, evening and night in the bar with the Saturday crowds, the Christmas shoppers, and all the while he’ll be wondering if today’s the day, today’s the day of his first social murder or if today’s the day he does nothing more than think about it, think about that day the country was made happier nine years ago.
Social murder, social murder.
He thinks the two words as he walks, timing each syllable with each step. Social murder. What an idea. What a world. What a thing that it’s been accepted so quickly, so smoothly. It’s as if the country was waiting for those six people to be in the right place at the right time, and it doesn’t matter that Doug wasn’t there at the time or the place.
Here he is, thinking of it as the patters of snow hit his black coat.
The old couple outside the shopping centre and the streets full of people, the kids off school for the start of the summer holidays, the parents with their babies in pushchairs, the young people meeting friends, the shoppers, the old couple hand in hand as they have been for years, decades. The three boys behind them, the three shirtless boys armed with cans of lager and derisory shouts to the couple, asking if the man still gives her one, if she sucks it, if she swallows it, and their high laughter stopping their words from forming complete sentences. The people shaking their heads, the sour looks, the very young children watching this. The elderly couple not looking back, still hand in hand, and the man, the big man whose face and name will be in the media from now until forever. The big man Terry Salisbury who’s home from Afghanistan, who’s walking through the streets he knows and now wishes he didn’t. Terry crossing the road towards the boys and shouting at them, shouting what are they doing, what are they playing at, the couple finally turning and the three boys jeering at Terry and more and more people stopping their shopping to watch. The tallest boy trying to square up to Terry but he isn’t big enough and he doesn’t back away and he tells Terry to fuck off, to leave it and Terry punches him hard and fast and the boy drops, screaming. And when the other two boys come to Terry, he beats them and they drop and he beats them until the ground around them is red and they’re not shouting. And the applause starts from somewhere in the thronged shoppers and the petition to free Terry from police custody starts twenty-three minutes later.
“The people spoke,” Doug says and is only aware he spoke aloud by the odd look a passing woman gives him. He looks away fast, turns into Mid Gate and is immediately exposed to the December wind. He grins bitterly, wishes for a scarf to wrap around his chin and mouth and crosses the road at the same time as a woman in her twenties, a woman with a small boy beside her. A man carrying several large bags bumps Doug, turns and apologises quickly.
“No problem,” Doug says and isn’t sure if the man’s heard him above the wind and hundreds of people all around. He watches the man’s back and the little boy bashes into his legs. Doug manages to remain standing and it’s a hard job on the icy road. He skids as the boy drops, already screaming as if he’s been kicked to the ground.
“Sorry,” he says to the boy and the advancing mother at the same time but she’s not looking at him. She’s dropping her cigarette and from what feels like a massive distance away, Doug’s watching her hand descend to her child, not as a lifting hand but as a claw that clamps on the boy’s shoulder and yanks him upright.
“Sorry,” Doug says again, only dimly noticing the shoppers all around and even less so registering their curious glances.
“You stupid little bastard,” the mother screams to her child and he screams even louder.
“Hey, wait—” Doug says and wishes he was surprised that the woman hasn’t looked from her child.
“Watch where you’re fucking going,” she shouts and shakes the child. Doug does nothing but watch her march the crying boy to the pavement and into the crowds.
A car’s horn goes from somewhere close by; Doug trots to the pavement and stares after the woman. She’s isn’t hard to see or hear. She’s shouting at the boy and the boy is crying and pain digs sharp claws into Doug’s palm.
He’s clenched his hand into a fiercely tight fist and no matter how much he wants to, he can’t undo it, can’t let go, can’t stop the dumb anger from wanting to spill out of his mouth and out of his hands. Instead of moving, he listens to the babble of voices inside his head.
What a waste of space I mean talking to her son like that Jesus Christ what chance does that kid have best if that bitch dropped dead right now best for everyone someone else will do it someone else saw her give it ten seconds you see you see.
And the thing that’s worse, the thing that makes him want to scream until he explodes is there’s no voice that says he likes people and enjoys his job and is happy to be around them. The thing that—
Car horn again, people looking to the road, the woman easily fifty steps ahead of Doug and he can still hear the screaming child and the car is picking up speed.
People run for any cover they can and even in the last three seconds, the woman with the child doesn’t quite believe what’s happening. There’s nobody around her now and Doug running to her, running with his arms outstretched while he can see the surprise on her face, not fear, just surprise on a pretty face topped with dark blonde hair and hands coming up, reaching out of her big coat and the boy still screaming.
The car hits the woman and the boy, the boy vanishes below and the woman bends double then flies as if kicked. She strikes the side of the supermarket, the car passes over the boy and only stops when it hits the woman and the wall.
Doug finally registers the sounds of breaking glass and smashed metal. There are no screams. Not yet. There’s an ugly jagged sound of scraping metal as the elderly driver cracks open the crumpled door and steps out. One lens of his glasses is cracked. His white hair, still thick despite his age, blows wildly. Blood comes from a small gash on his forehead. He wipes it, glances at the body almost visible on the front of his car and waves at Doug who finds his voice from somewhere far below.
“Both?” he croaks. “Both?”
The man frowns.
“Sorry?”
“You killed both.”
The driver nods, understanding.
“I saw what happened and... well, to be honest, what chance did the boy have? Best he’s out of it, don’t you think?”
He wipes the blood again, then checks his damaged glasses. Around Doug and the driver, people advance. There are still no screams; there’s a low voice, someone calling the Department. Doug listens. Doug feels the snow on his hair and the freezing wind on his exposed face. Doug stares at the mangled body and Doug wants to feel glad he can’t see the child’s body under the wheels.
Outside the supermarket and surrounded by Christmas shoppers, Doug tilts his head back and stares at the low sky. The snow falling into his eyes doesn’t matter. He keeps staring.
Luke Walker has been writing horror and fantasy fiction for most of his life. Much of his work focuses on urban fantasy novels although he has always had a love of horror stories - a love which started at age nine when he read Poe's The Cask of Amontillado. He is thirty-one and lives in Cambridgeshire, England, with his wife Rebecca, two cats and not enough zombie films. He still won't go into a wine cellar.
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